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Strategies for releasing music are changing as quickly as new BuzzFeed listicles can be written, but **Beyoncé’**s surprise December deluge of The Visual Album, released in a flash all at once, complete with videos, felt at the time like a gauntlet was being laid: Step up your game, distribute your music in innovative ways, and maybe you, too, will be rewarded with the fastest-selling album in the history of iTunes. Seven months later, no one else has tried to replicate her shock-and-awe tactic—it wouldn’t feel so original anymore and, anyway, who would dare try to follow in Queen Bey’s footsteps?

But a number of artists have spent the summer finding new ways to take to the Internet with their music. The big story this week, against the odds, is Weird Al Yankovic, who used an incredibly well-planned viral strategy to promote his new album and ended up with the first No. 1 album of his entire career. A pre-Web artist who’s popular parody music videos in the 1980s and 1990s feel weirdly prescient to the kind of webby pop culture comedy that dominates sites like BuzzFeed today—one could say he went viral before it was a thing—Weird Al’s Internet instincts have led him to the most innovative release strategy of the season. When RCA refused to provide him production resources, Al responded by proving that he didn’t need the record industry anymore anyway, instead partnering with popular viral content creators Nerdist, College Humor, and Funny or Die to create and distribute his spot-on satires of Iggy Azalea and Pharrell Williams.

While Al’s strategy led directly to record sales, a few artists are finding other fun ways to stay relevant and feed a hungry Internet between major album releases.Last week, Nicki Minaj surprise guest-jumped on a remix of one of the most viral hip-hop songs of the moment, **Rae Sremmurd’**s “No Flex Zone.” It’s a trick she’s been mastering all year, spitting some of the best lines of her life and reminding everyone of her rapping chops, on a series of one-off guest verses on **Young Thug’**s “Danny Glover” and Lil Herb’s “Chiraq,” and then uploading them for free listen on to her Soundcloud. She’s mastered the Internet so well that all of 2014, starting with her remix of PTAF’s “Boss Ass Bitch” on December 30, 2013, feels like one big setup to the fall release of her next album.

And befitting our ever-shortening attention spans, the newest method might be releasing a trailer for a song before we even get to hear the whole thing. Justin Bieber was supposed to be retired (LOL) from making music, but he surprised his Beliebers this week by releasing eleven snippets of new songs in quick clips on his Instagram account. And even though **Kanye West’**s first post-Yeezus album is one of the most-anticipated and guarded releases of the next year or two, he’s let his friend French Montana Instagram a tease of two new bars from a song from his forthcoming record. Even the OG innovator Beyoncé has gotten into the Insta-seduction game: Just this week, she partnered with Fifty Shades of Grey to put a trailer for the film on her Instagram. The clip contained a shortened version of a new take on her iconic “Crazy in Love” that, presumably, we’ll hear the rest of when the movie comes out next February—light years away in Internet time. Makes you wonder if someday people will even go to the movies anymore, even to hear a Beyoncé song.